Response to "Students, Authorship, and the Work of Composition"

I enjoyed Horner's article, though it was fairly difficult to read. I had to read many paragraphs twice and struggled to figure out exactly what he meant by terms such as "materiality" (a term I'm sure I should be familiar with at this point). Although I've found every article we've read over the course of the semester interesting and well-written, I feel like a lot of them have been about how Composition teachers grade their students' papers. It would have been nice to read articles about the actual day-to-day teaching of Composition (as opposed to grading or potential projects that some of us will never have the opportunity to implement). I feel like "getting creative" in the classroom, coming up with things for my students to do, keeping them interested, etc. was a bit of a struggle. I tended to do the same sorts of things with them (mostly group activities), week after week. I was always impressed with the members of my cohort group; they had such interesting ideas to get their students involved and invested in the classroom, and with each other. I wish some of them would write papers! I would definitely read them.

Around page 510, the article started to become more accessible. I thought this was great: "This is not to deny that in some sense students do want to learn to produce what schools or society demand--whether it be research papers, Edited American English, or a smiling face. But it has to be recognized that those desires are socially produced, not autonomous, and so neither inherent nor universal but historical." It's always good to be reminded how many of our thoughts and subsequent behaviors are not our own, as we assume, but socially produced. Though I consider myself to be an independent person, one who constantly questions what a Southern, middle-class woman should do and be, I'm still overwhelmingly influenced by societal pressures and obligations. Simply reading a fashion magazine is enough to make me feel like crap, to send me outside in the rain to run sprints.

I think treating students as authors is one thing that most Composition teachers already do (or at least try to do). Hopefully? Right? It seems like common sense that we should read and respond to the meanings of ours students' texts instead of simply correcting their writing errors s(510). Though I feel like writing well is important, and it's easier to "see" good ideas when they're well written, teachers should always look at what their students are trying to say and do and help them accomplish these things...

Response to "Performing Writing, Performing Literacy"

Nothing in this article surprised me, really, and I was a bit annoyed by it, to be honest. I didn't feel like it really offered any practical advice for my teaching and its content was pretty obvious: students write all sorts of stuff, whether inside or outside of school, and sometimes they perform what they write. That seems like the gist of it, really, though it was said much more eloquently than this, of course.

I guess I'm used to viewing writing as performance: whether its reading at cafe night or talking about writing stories or teaching composition. They are all performance. Life is a performance. Yesterday, at the coffee shop, I knocked over my tea and then I cussed. That was a performance, though one of which I wasn't particularly proud.

I'm being sarcastic today. I feel moody.

One thing I thought about while reading this article was the way in which some innovative people are making writing into performances unlike what has been done before, for example, Opium (a literary magazine) puts on these performances across the country called Literary Death Matches. They know that typical readings where you go and sit in uncomfortable chairs for a long time and listen to someone read in a monotone voice aren't very fun or interesting. The new format turns stories into performative art, pitting two writers against one another to read for short bursts of time. There's a winner. People get creative, competitive. They don't read their most boring, plotless story. Damian did one a while back, in Denver. Maybe he'll talk about it in his post and I can read it.

It was kind of fun reading that "I'm Daaaaaaat N*!!" poem in College Composition and Communication. That was the best part, I think, the incongruence of reading that in this context.

Response to "Everybody Has Their Own Ideas"

I loved this article. I know I'm guilty of underlining cliches in my students' writing and then writing "cliche" above it, which isn't very helpful. This article helped me understand why. Students use cliches for all sorts of reasons, and to assume that they're just relying on familiar language to avoid insight and meaning isn't accurate (or at least isn't always accurate). In the future, when I see a cliche, I'll look beyond it to see what the student might be trying to say, and how I might help him/her say it differently, or more clearly.

Cliches bug me. I can't help it.

Great quote, which sums up the article for me: "I want to make clear that I do not think we should celebrate errors in pronoun agreement and cliches as if they were our students' most brilliant utterances. But I would like us to consider that the places in our students' essays that most annoy us because they seem so uncritical are also places where individual students (much like their teachers, as I will argue in the next section) are working hard to make sense of a world in which they are always both insiders and outsiders..."

One thing I found really interesting in this article was how students were using the conclusion to express their own opinions. Conclusions are funny little creatures, and it seems like no one really knows what to do with them. (Side Note: I was always taught that the conclusion should contain no new information, that one should only sum things up by reiterating their thesis and main points. After reading the chapter on introductions and conclusions in the Norton Field Guide, however, I realized that there are a number of effective ways to conclude a paper/essay. After reading Skorczewski's article, it's clear that conclusions baffle many of us).

Many freshman made A's in high school by writing essays full of cliches and commonalities. Analytical thinking still isn't particularly encouraged, so this is a big change for them.

Response to "Understanding Visual Rhetoric..."

I wasn't crazy about this article. It seems like a lot of fancy language to say some very basic things, and the previous two articles we've read on a similar topic (incorporating technology into the classroom) offered me more as far as useful information.

While reading this article, I kept thinking about this:
Last week I tutored another student in the Writing Center who barely knew how to use her e-mail account. I had to show her how to attach documents and save files, in addition to using the library databases. This is not an uncommon occurrence, and it's really started to worry me. Most of these students are young, 18-20, and I wonder how they've gotten to this point knowing so little. Didn't they have computer classes in high school? Don't they have computers at home? It's also not uncommon to work with students who bring in their own laptops who don't know how to cut and paste and do other very basic things. How is this possible? I don't really know. All I know is that having students design websites is probably out of the range of many of them. It's also out of my range. Of course, this is also what makes it a great idea. The best way to learn how to do something, of course, is by doing it.

I think I'll bring my students back into the Writing Studio before this semester is over. I'm not sure what I'll have them do, but I want to make sure that none of my students are the ones coming into the Writing Center without basic computer skills.

I liked the examples the Hocks used, particularly "The Ballad of the Internet Nutball," which was the first hypertextual dissertation accepted by Rensselear Polytechnic University. It's pretty awesome that the author, Christine Boese, has been updating it since 1998. I also really like the idea of taking a show like Xena and making it literary--analyzing episodes, etc. A lot of academics are kind of snobby about this sort of thing. I think it's great.

Response to "Thinking about Multimodality"

I really liked this chapter, and thought it went well with last week's reading, which is still on my mind. The authors, Pamela Takayoshi and Cynthia L. Selfe, did a good job addressing all sides of the issue--including laying out the various hesitations and fears that composition teachers might have in regards to incorporating digital and other media. I want to read this book now.

I really liked this quote by Mary Hocks: "A student-centered pedagogy asks students to work within their own cultures and discourses by using experimental forms to learn actively from one another and to engage with the world around them" (5-6). I feel that students now, more than ever, need to engaged on their own terms. There are so many distractions, so many other things that are competing for their attention. There are times in class when I can literally see my students itching to check the internet from their phones, to send a text, or to put in their earplugs. In order for them to write the best papers they are capable of writing, and to think creatively, they have to be engaged.

The structure of this chapter, with its side-boxes and numbers, its subheadings and check marks, worked well for me. It was clear and easy to read, and it laid out all of the pros and cons in a straight forward manner (and many of the cons were things I was thinking about, so it was good to see them addressed so directly). I also liked their suggestions of starting small, with one assignment, and making even that optional. I think this would work well for those teachers who don't feel comfortable with computers and other technology.

I'm also loving that "driveway effect" quote by Hugh Fraser. NPR's This American Life could make me stay in my car forever. It would be amazing to see my students so engaged that they didn't know exactly what time it was, at all times.

Response to "Made Not Only in Words..."

This article, though well-written and all, seems rather outdated and obvious, though it may not have felt quite so outdated/obvious in December, 2004, when it was published. The author, Kathleen Yancey, states that "Literacy today is in the midst of a tectonic change...What do our references to writing mean? Do they mean print only?" She goes on to talk about how assessments view writing as"...'words on paper,' composed on the page with a pen or pencil..." (298). This just feels like a really outdated statement; even in 2004, I had been taking standardized tests, such as the GRE, on the computer for years, and I think everyone would agree that literacy has already undergone the "tectonic change" to which she refers. Pencils seem to be going the way of the dinosaur and nearly everyone has a laptop.

I just don't think people now see literacy in such a narrow way--not educated people, anyway.

There were some things I found interesting: for example, that writers in the 19th century were reading their work in public, and readers were gathering together in 'reading circles' (300). I also appreciated the stats on the decreasing number of English majors, as well as English departments. It's a bit scary to think about job prospects, even though I'm trying to do everything I can to make myself an attractive job candidate (which mostly seems to mean publishing).

Yancey goes on to give a "list of what students aren't asked to do in the current model," though, again, I don't think it's all that relevant (311). I think using technology is something that both students and teachers are constantly thinking about. I'm writing a blog response, for example--no pencil and ink here! I'm publishing my stories online at places that combine literature and politics and art in ways I couldn't have imagined a few years ago. I was talking to a friend the other day, and he was telling me how he communicates with his students on Facebook. They have a class page and, since the students are already constantly on Facebook, they go there and check in more often than they would at, say, Blackboard/Web CT.

I don't know...some good stuff here, but overall I just find it a bit obvious...

Response to "Building a Mystery": Alternative Research Writing...

One thing that I really liked about this article, and found different from the other pedagogical articles I've been assigned to read, is that the authors routinely quote creative writers: songwriters, novelists, poets. The authors valued writing as a whole, instead of separating different kinds of writing into neat little fields that shouldn't overlap, which I appreciated. Also, considering where we go to school, it was nice to have a quote from Donald Barthelme: "Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing, a forcing of what and how. We have all heard novelists testify to the fact that, beginning a new book, they are utterly baffled as to how to proceed, what should be written and how it might be written, even though they've done a dozen..." (423). It reminded me of something that his brother, Frederick Barthelme, said recently in workshop--once you reach page 70 in a novel, it's all downhill. Of course, he knows, we all know, that writing is rarely easy, but things are more difficult at the beginning, when everything feels like "not-knowing."

There were a lot of things in the article that I found useful, and that made me think, though there were a few times at which I questioned the authors' tactics. For example, in the first paragraph, Davis and Shadle quote from 1982 survey. Considering that "Building a Mystery" was published nearly twenty years later, I found it a little suspect. I also found it somewhat unnecessary to to state all of the objections and criticisms to each of the alternative research writing methods that they discuss. If you ask students to write one kind of paper, it invariably excludes others. This isn't really a criticism.

There were so many great ideas here, however, that I feel a little badly for pointing out such small criticisms. This was my favorite: I LOVED the idea of the autoethnography, "where students interview three people about themselves, then affirm or rebut the comments" (434). If I asked three people questions about myself--say, my mother, one of my professors, and a friend from high school--I would get all sorts of contradictory thoughts about who "I" am. Which of these people am I really? And then, of course, I have ideas about myself, but if I wrote them down on a piece of paper, would anyone recognize the person I think I am, in my head? And if no one recognized me, what does this say? There are so many interesting questions here that I'm sort of dying to do one of these now. I was also really interested in the multi-genre/media/disciplinary/cultural research project, and the examples from the students at Eastern Oregon University. The authors referred to these examples early in the article, and I thought I was going to get to read one of these papers in their entirities, so I was a little disappointed. The students at Eastern Oregon seemed excited about, and invested in, their projects in a way that students generally don't while writing papers. I was particularly interested in Sherri Edvalson's "A Feminist Education for Barbie" and Michelle Skow's Japanese American Internment project. I'd love to read these.

Response to "Materiality and Genre..."

I thought this article was great for a number of reasons, and made me consider a lot of things I don't ordinarily think about. I was underlining and starring and making notes all over the place. I also disagreed with a few things, which I like because I often don't feel like I have enough knowledge about the things I read in Practicum to disagree. One of the things I had a "problem" with was Bawarshi's piece, about the Patient Medical History Form. Bawarshi states that "the genre is mainly concerned with a patient's physical symptoms [which] suggests that one can isolate physical symptoms and treat them with little to no reference to the patient's state of mind and the effect that state of mind might have on these symptoms" (551). As someone who has filled out these forms before, I disagree that the PMHF is "mainly concerned" with one's current physical symptoms. The forms (and there are a lot of them) ask all sorts of questions and get all sorts of information, and this has never struck me as the focus. There is also no reason that patients can't list mental as well as physical symptoms. Bawarshi states that "the forms tend to discourage patients' reporting of mental or emtional circumstances," though he failed to say how or why. I'm not sure what his point is, ultimately. Is he suggesting that patients shouldn't list their symptoms prior to seeing a doctor, that this should be done away with? What is the alternative? I guess this is ultimately a little off topic, but it just seemed like he had a lot of claims in this paragraph that he provided no evidence for.

The main thing that interested me while reading this article was language, and how different communities define words differently. On page 555, Mary Jo Reiff writes, "Since the main goal of an ethnography, according to Moss, is to gain 'increased insight into the ways in which language communities work' (170), it follows that the oral and written genres of groups will play a central role in the investigation of social context..." Last week, I tutored a student in 102 who was writing her discourse community paper on the tanning salon where she is employed. I was fascinated by the language of this community. The tanning beds were given names like Bahama Baby and Paradise Island, and were categorized according to Levels. For example, all of the employees used the Level One beds, which meant they were hardcore devotees. They ran two-for-one specials called "Bogos." Even the lotions they sold (pushed?) on customers had what I would call fun-in-the-sun names. I was so fascinated. The student had worked at the tanning salon for so long that she didn't realize laypersons wouldn't know what a "bogo" was, or that "light" and "fair" did not mean the same thing. We spent much of our session talking about properly defining terms so that her audience would understand what she was talking about. Words, in general, are tricky little things. They often have so many different meanings and connotations.

Along these same lines, I found it of interest that courts define "might" as "probable." Whenever I say I "might" go somewhere, it almost always means I won't.

I really enjoyed reading Devitt's piece, "Where Communities Collide: Exploring a Legal Genre." She writes, "What I discovered is that no matter how much I elaborated, no matter how many assumptions I made explicit, I could not capture in those instructions all the information that the lawyers considered relevant to the jury's task. Clarifying for the jury's purposes clashed with adhering to legal purposes" (545). While I was reading her piece, I could not help but thinking that the instructions were purposefully misleading, that jury instructions aren't really meant to be followed exactly as the lawyers write them. And then I read that the jury is actually asked to evaluate what terms like "great" and "serious" mean but (of course) "nowhere do the instructions say that" (546). I seriously doubt that lawyers would ever want other lawyers on their juries. They don't really want people to know what's going on; it seems like the system works, in large part, due to the ignorance of laypersons.

Anyway, lots of good stuff to think about...

Teachers Rhetorical Comments on Papers Response

I found this article interesting, and approached in a fair and unbiased manner. While the authors point out the harsh and authoritarian comments that teachers wrote on student papers ("This is just silly." "Throw away!"), they also pointed out the positive and encouraging remarks. Additionally, they noted that the teachers who graded these papers were more than likely overworked, with too many students and too little time/energy for all of them. When I first started reading this article, I was wary--braced for the overly harsh judgment towards composition teachers--but I was, alas, bracing myself for nothing. I feel like teachers, for the most part, do the best they can, and I felt like this was acknowledged throughout the article. There are easier and better paying jobs out there, and most of those who choose to teach for a living have other options.

A comment about the stats:
Even if most of the global comments were brief, I was impressed with the high percentage of papers with global or rhetorical comments: 77%. This was quite a bit higher than I would have suspected. There were other statistics I found curious, or surprising, for example that 25% of the papers had no grade on them.

I liked this quote:
"The primary emotion that they felt as they read through these teacher comments, our readers told us, was a sort of chagrin: these papers and comments revealed to them a world of teaching writing that was harder and sadder than they wanted it to be... (Connors and Lunsford 214). For some reason, this quote gave me a vivid picture of a thin, older woman with mussed hair and an ink mark on her cheek. She's single (probably divorced), and has cats and she eats cake for dinner sometimes. Perhaps she allows herself one cigarette a day. I feel like a sexist or something "ist" for admitting this, but this was the image I got.

I also liked the quote about the "...cryptic systems of numbers, fractions, decimals..." (Connors and Lunsford 209). Maybe it's the word "cryptic," but also the idea that a composition paper would ever need a fraction or a decimal. It would be interesting to see how the teacher arrived at such a precise number. Clearly, a teacher like this would have a system...

Webs of Mentoring in Grad School Response

I enjoyed reading this article, "Webs of Mentoring in Graduate School." Mentoring isn't something I think about, especially now that I'm settled. I particularly like the idea of "older" graduate students mentoring those in the incoming class. Once someone is settled somewhere, it's like they completely forget what it's like to be 'the new kid.' Being new is difficult, and it's something we all are at one point or another (or many points). Simple things seem so hard in the beginning, when there are so many at once-- how to obtain a parking permit and a card for printing, where and what to eat on campus--it's like a rite of passage for people to figure these things out on their own, it seems, to suffer more than necessary, in essence. But it doesn't have to be this way.

I wonder if an established mentoring program between faculty and graduate students would work at someplace like this, a public institution where there are many more graduate students than faculty. I have a friend who is getting her MFA at Sarah Lawrence and she meets frequently with her professors, on and off campus. While I know my professors would be happy to meet with me and it's probably just as simple as asking, the professors here would not have the time or the energy to mentor all of us. For example, there are four creative writing professors and something like 35 creative writing students. I don't know what the solution to something this is, though it's possible that a creative writing student might actually benefit as much or more from being mentored by a Rhet Comp professor, or someone who writes literary criticism. I still find myself being resistant to criticism, to reading work from the 17th Century, all sorts of other things. Perhaps if I was mentored by someone who was passionate about one these things, it would completely change my mind.

Mostly I enjoyed this article because it's good to be reminded that we can't do it alone. No matter what one is trying to achieve in life, one's success depends on the help and generosity of many people.